Fake News on Both Sides of the Border: Media Literacy Among Young Hungarians Living in the Partium Region (Romania) and Along the Hungarian Border
Fake News on Both Sides of the Border: Media Literacy Among Young Hungarians Living in the Partium Region (Romania) and Along the Hungarian Border

Summary/Abstract: Digitalization and online social media platforms have radically transformed the flow of information. Anyone can disseminate almost any information on these platforms, including fake news and other fraudulent messages. The latter includes phishing scams and fake weepstakes. In this environment, media literacy is critical, as it enables individuals to critically evaluate media content from multiple perspectives and identify fraudulent content. Most research focusing on media literacy among young people has been based on selfreporting, examining a specific type of information, and only in the context of a single country. There is a lack of research exploring differences in media literacy among members of an ethnic group living in multiple countries. Our research simultaneously assesses, in practice, the ability to identify fake news, phishing scams, and fake sweepstakes among young Hungarians living in two neighboring countries on opposite sides of the Romanian–Hungarian border. The questionnaire consisted of 20 screenshots of real social media posts, emails, Messenger messages, and SMS messages. Each contained either verified false or real information, and participants had to decide the message’s authenticity based on clues in the screenshot. Based on the results, it can be said that young Hungarians in Partium scored significantly lower across all three deception categories than young Hungarians living across the border. This may be due to fundamental deficiencies in their media awareness, the different socio-cultural, infrastructural, and educational conditions in the two countries, and their status as an ethnic minority, but sampling and questionnaire bias may also play a role.

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